Naugatuck, Connecticut, and the "One Tree" Behind Its Name

Naugatuck, Connecticut, is named for its river, and the river’s name, an old tradition says, began with one big tree at a fishing spot in today’s Seymour. The town only took the name in 1844. Before that, the area was part of Waterbury and went by Salem.

A spot, then a river, then a town

J. Hammond Trumbull, who spent years on Connecticut’s Native place names, summed up the whole trip in his 1881 book: Naugatuck is “a name transferred to the river from some locality on or near it, and from the river to the valley and town.”

The early records back him up. Joseph Anderson, in his history of Waterbury, traced the first use to the records of the New Haven colony for May 27, 1657, when the settlers at Paugasuck asked for the right to buy land “over Naugatuck River.” Trumbull found “Nagatuck river” in a deed to Thomas Wheeler that same year and “Nawcotuck river” in a Native deed of 1668. And a deed of 1678 reserved “the fishing place at Naugatuck,” on land that Trumbull says is “now in Seymour village.” William J. Pape, in his 1918 History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley, had “no doubt” that this old Naugatuck, the one “which gave the river its name,” was at or near the spot where Seymour stands.

The river didn’t win its name right away. Anderson says a 1680 report called it “Mattatuck River” once and “Naugatuck or Mattatuck” twice, and for a time people even called it the Waterbury River. Naugatuck stuck anyway.

From Salem to Naugatuck

The town itself had another name first. Pape says the place was part of Waterbury until 1844 “and was known by the name of Salem or Salem Bridge.” Then, at the General Assembly’s May session in 1844, the Salem section of Waterbury, along with pieces of Bethany and Oxford, was “incorporated as a distinct town, by the name of Naugatuck.”

A year later, Anderson notes, the legislature chartered the Naugatuck Railroad Company, “and from that time the old aboriginal name became a household word to thousands who might not otherwise have known it.”

“One tree,” or not

So what does Naugatuck mean? The answer most of the old books give is “one tree,” and it goes back a long way.

John Warner Barber wrote in 1836 that the old name of Humphreysville, the village that’s now Seymour, “signifies in the Indian language one large tree, so named from a large tree which formerly stood near Rock Rimmon, about three fourths of a mile north of the falls.” Naugatuc, he said, was the English way of saying it, and it became the river’s name. Trumbull says President Stiles heard the name in 1787 from a Paugussett informant and wrote it down as “Nau-ka-tungk, or Derby Bridge.” He wrote that this “confirms the traditional origin of the name, from a remarkable single tree, which probably served as a land mark,” and he matched it to a Native phrase meaning “one tree.”

There’s a family memory behind it too. Pape quotes a letter passing on what Eunice Mauwee, daughter of Chuce, told the Rev. Smith Dayton: “the name Naugatuck meant ‘one big tree,’ and was pronounced by the Indians Naw-ka-tunk.” The letter adds that the tree gave shade when they came to the Rimmon falls to fish. Barber calls Chuse, as he spells it, the last sachem of the Derby Indians.

Not everyone agreed. A Derby historian proposed “fishing place at the falls,” and Trumbull called that “inadmissible.” Pape, who called the tree tradition “apparently direct and authentic,” still allowed that the old fishing place was “quite as likely” to have been named for “the bend in the river.” And Henry Gannett’s 1905 place-names bulletin for the federal government simply says authorities differ, “giving both ‘one tree’ and ‘fork of the river.’”

So the name Naugatuck didn’t start in Naugatuck at all. If you head a few miles south to Seymour and find Rock Rimmon and the falls, you’ll be about where, by the old story, the one tree stood.

Sources & further reading

• J. Hammond Trumbull, Indian Names of Places, etc., in and on the Borders of Connecticut (1881), pp. 35–36. The name “transferred to the river from some locality on or near it, and from the river to the valley and town”; the forms of 1657, 1668, 1672, 1676 and 1678; Stiles’s “Nau-ka-tungk, or Derby Bridge”; the “one tree” reading; and the rejection of “fishing place at the falls.”
• William J. Pape, History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley, vol. 1 (1918), pp. 347–349. Quotes Joseph Anderson on the record of May 27, 1657, the 1680 report, the Waterbury name for the river, the incorporation of 1844 and the railroad of 1845; then Pape’s own pages on Eunice Mauwee’s “one big tree,” “the bend in the river,” and Salem or Salem Bridge before 1844.
• John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections (1836; 2nd ed. cited), p. 199. “One large tree” near Rock Rimmon, Naugatuc as the English pronunciation given to the stream, and Chuse as the last sachem of the Derby Indians.
• Henry Bronson, The History of Waterbury, Connecticut (1858), p. 15, note. The same “one large tree” tradition, citing Barber.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 220. “Authorities differ”: “one tree” and “fork of the river.”
• GNIS feature 209191 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Naugatuck.